Bril Text Format

While Bril’s canonical representation is a JSON AST, humans don’t like to read and write JSON. To accommodate our human foibles, we also have a simple textual representation. There is a parser and pretty printer tool that can convert the text representation to and from JSON.

For example, this Bril program in JSON:

{
  "functions": [{
    "name": "main",
    "instrs": [
      { "op": "const", "type": "int", "dest": "v0", "value": 1 },
      { "op": "const", "type": "int", "dest": "v1", "value": 2 },
      { "op": "add", "type": "int", "dest": "v2", "args": ["v0", "v1"] },
      { "op": "print", "args": ["v2"] },
      { "op": "alloc", "type": { "ptr" : "int" }, "dest": "v3", "args": ["v0"] },
      { "op": "free", "args": ["v3"] },
    ]
  }]
}

Gets represented in text like this:

@main {
  v0: int = const 1;
  v1: int = const 2;
  v2: int = add v0 v1;
  print v2;
  v3: ptr<int> = alloc v0;
  free v3;
}

Tools

The bril-txt parser & pretty printer are written in Python. You can install them with uv by doing something like:

$ cd bril-txt
$ uv tool install .

You’ll now have tools called bril2json and bril2txt. Both read from standard input and write to standard output. You can try a “round trip” like this, for example:

$ bril2json < test/parse/add.bril | bril2txt

The bril2json parser also supports a -p flag to include source positions.